Canada's Death Panels: A Foretaste of ObamaCare

by
Thomas A. Droleskey

No: We are concerned with men and women, our fellow
creatures, our brothers and sisters! Poor human beings, ill human
beings, they are unproductive, if you will. But does that mean that they
have lost the right to live? Have you, have I, the right to live only
so long as we are productive, so long as we are recognised by others as
productive?

If the principle that men is entitled to kill his
unproductive fellow-man is established and applied, then woe betide all
of us when we become aged and infirm!

If it is legitimate to kill unproductive members of
the community, woe betide the disabled who have sacrificed their health
or their limbs in the productive process! If unproductive men and women
can be disposed of by violent means, woe betide our brave soldiers who
return home with major disabilities as cripples, as invalids! If it is
once admitted that men have the right to kill “unproductive” fellow-men
even though it is at present applied only to poor and defenceless
mentally ill patients” then the way is open for the murder of all
unproductive men and women: the incurably ill, the handicapped who are
unable to work, those disabled in industry or war. The way is open,
indeed, for the murder of all of us when we become old and infirm and
therefore unproductive. Then it will require only a secret order to be
issued that the procedure which has been tried and tested with the
mentally ill should be extended to other “unproductive” persons, that it
should also be applied to those suffering from incurable tuberculosis,
the aged and infirm, persons disabled in industry, soldiers with
disabling injuries!

Then no man will be safe: some committee or other
will be able to put him on the list of “unproductive” persons, who in
their judgment have become “unworthy to live”. And there will be no
police to protect him, no court to avenge his murder and bring his
murderers to justice.

Who could then have any
confidence in a doctor? He might report a patient as unproductive and
then be given instructions to kill him! It does not bear thinking of,
the moral depravity, the universal mistrust which will spread even in
the bosom of the family, if this terrible doctrine is tolerated,
accepted and put into practice. Woe betide mankind, woe betide our
German people, if the divine commandment, “Thou shalt not kill”, which
the Lord proclaimed on Sinai amid thunder and lightning, which God our
Creator wrote into man's conscience from the beginning, if this
commandment is not merely violated but the violation is tolerated and
remains unpunished! (Bishop Clemens von Galens, August 3, 1941, Sermon Against Adolf Hitler's Euthanasia Policies.)

Unlike the case of the murdered Mrs. Theresa Marie Schindler-Schiavo (see Five Years Later), whose estranged, adulterous husband sought her execution and won the legal "right" to do so over the objection of her parents and siblings, the case of Baby Joseph Maraachli, who is in imminent peril at this time of having his breathing tube removed at Victoria Hospital in the City of London, Ontario, Canada, involves a decision made by a Brave New World/1984 type committee that goes by the remarkably Hitlerian name of the "Ontario Consent and Capacity Board over the vehement objections of his parents. The "Ontario Consent and Capacity Board" confirmed a recommendation made by Baby Joseph Maraachli's doctors, who believed that it is best to let the infant die rather than to have him transferred to a hospital in the United States of America so that he can undergo a tracheotomy there to increase his chances of survival, at least for the time being, from what is called a "neurodegenerative" disease that has made him a "vegetable," an obscene characterization that his parents reject:

LONDON, Ontario, February 24, 2011 (LifeSiteNews.com) - Dying
one-year-old Joseph Maraachli's’s family says two new videos of him
flailing and reacting to tickling belie his hospital’s claim that he is
in a permanent vegetative state.

The video of Joseph being tickled,
which was shot Sunday evening only hours before the hospital had
planned to remove his life support, also shows Joseph’s hands tied down -
a measure the hospital took after Joseph removed the tube from his
throat on at least two separate occasions.

“How can a baby be in a vegetative state who has his hands tied - as
we speak - for him to not pull out his tube?” asked Joseph’s aunt, Samar
Nader. “How does a baby in a vegetative state respond to combing or
tickling?”

“What really boggles my mind is how we’re not allowed to videotape
him or have media outlets watching him to show the public what he’s
like,” she added. “That’s very frustrating.”

The family took Victoria Hospital in London to court last week to
prevent them from removing his life support against their wishes, but
Ontario Superior Court Justice Helen Rady sided with the hospital. Her
decision was based on doctors’ testimony that he is in a permanent
vegetative state with no brain stem reflex.

But family members question the doctors’ judgment, saying Joseph is
fully responsive to touch, particularly that he hates being touched by
cold hands, tickles easily, and moves his head when his hair is
brushed. They also say he responds to loud noises by turning his head
toward the sound.

Sam Sansalone, a spokesman for the family, says the fact that the
hospital has had to tie his hands down shows “how absurd” the claim is
that Joseph is in a vegetative state.

“How could a supposedly persistent vegetative state child have so
many occasions of purposeful neuromuscular movements of yanking out
their uncomfortable air tube, so many times that hospital staff would
have to tie his hands to prevent further episodes?” he asked.

Sansalone also says that hospital staff failed to note the tube removals in his chart.

Joseph suffers from a severe neurological disorder, but his specific
condition remains undiagnosed. Doctors have given him no chance of
recovery, so his parents, Moe Maraachli and Sana Nader, have asked them
to perform a tracheotomy which would enable him to breathe on his own,
so that they could take him home. The doctors have refused, saying the
procedure is too risky.

Their daughter died from similar complications eight years ago, but
in that case doctors performed a tracheotomy and they were able to take
her home.

In January, the Consent and Capacity Board of Ontario sided with the
hospital, a decision backed up by Justice Rady last Thursday. The
hospital appeared set to remove Joseph’s life support on Monday at 10
a.m., but that got delayed when the family hired expert lawyer Mark
Handelman over the weekend with the financial support of the Euthanasia
Prevention Coalition.

The family has been trying to have Joseph transferred to a hospital
in the U.S., where they believe he’ll get better care or at least a
reassessment, and possibly the tracheotomy they need to bring him home.

The family has expressed concerns that hospital security is following
them around and denying them private visitations with Joseph.

On Tuesday, Children’s Hospital of Michigan in Detroit, where the
family had hoped to have Joseph transferred, refused to take him despite
previous assurances that they would. The family says, however, that
they are far from out of options.

The clock is ticking for the family as Joseph’s current hospital has
asked Ontario’s Office of the Public Guardian to assume decision-making
power after the family refused to have Joseph’s life support removed on
Monday. The public guardian could order it removed at any point.

Alex Schadenberg, executive director of the Euthanasia Prevention Coalition, warned in a Fox news interview that the court decision facilitates a system where doctors are
authorized to force life and death decisions on patients. He has said
he believes it is far worse than the “death panels” recently debated in
the U.S. as part of the federal health care law.

He emphasized to LifeSiteNews last week that the family isn’t pushing
for extraordinary treatment, just asking to care for their dying child
at home. “They’re arguing that the best way to do that is by doing a
tracheotomy so the child can somewhat breathe on his own and care for
him while he’s dying,” he explained.

“It’s the hospitals and the doctors once again usurping their power
over the people,” he said. “That’s what’s happening. And they have
significant power - they have the money and the courts behind them.
It’s absolutely ridiculous.” (Videos show ‘vegetable’ Baby Joseph reacting to parents.)

Yes, we have indeed arrived at a situation in a supposedly "civilized," "free" and "democratic" nation such as the People's Republic of Canada, a land of the sort of socialized medicine that is the ultimate goal of ObamaCare under the slogan of instituting a "single payer system of health care," where the death panels decried by the courageous Bishop Clemens von Galens in Munster, Germany, on August 3, 1941, are deciding to play God by taking measures over the objections of their relatives to expedite the deaths of human beings deemed by doctors possessed of a utilitarian ethos that is far from the letter and the spirit of the Hippocratic Oath to be "useless" or "vegetables." Bishop Clemens von Galens's comments of nearly seventy years ago applied not only to Nazi Germany in his own time: they apply to the "civilized" West today.

Consider again this passage from the Bishop's sermon of August 3, 1941, that was a courageous condemnation of the euthanasia laws in the Nazi regime and a prophetic clarion call to what would happen elsewhere in the world, proving that while Hitler's ideas have won the day in public policy in the "free" and "democratic" West even though his military forces were defeated in World War II:

Then no man will be safe: some committee or other
will be able to put him on the list of “unproductive” persons, who in
their judgment have become “unworthy to live”. And there will be no
police to protect him, no court to avenge his murder and bring his
murderers to justice.

Who could then have any
confidence in a doctor? He might report a patient as unproductive and
then be given instructions to kill him! It does not bear thinking of,
the moral depravity, the universal mistrust which will spread even in
the bosom of the family, if this terrible doctrine is tolerated,
accepted and put into practice. Woe betide mankind, woe betide our
German people, if the divine commandment, “Thou shalt not kill”, which
the Lord proclaimed on Sinai amid thunder and lightning, which God our
Creator wrote into man's conscience from the beginning, if this
commandment is not merely violated but the violation is tolerated and
remains unpunished! (Bishop Clemens von Galens, August 3, 1941, Sermon Against Adolf Hitler's Euthanasia Policies.)

I explained to my students in the early-1980s, when
teaching them in an Introduction to Political Science course at Nassau
Community College about the horrors of utilitarianism, that the day was
coming when a British-style system of socialized medicine would be
adopted in this country, telling them that someone at that time, 1983,
to be precise, who was sixty years old in the United Kingdom and who did
not have his own medical insurance was denied government payment for
various services, including heart surgery, as it was believed that the
cost of the surgery was not warranted by the patient's future level of
economic "productivity." One of the quotes that I liked to use in those
classes to demonstrate that Our Lord had indeed given us Catholic
writers to warn us most prophetically about the dangers of our own days
was this one from Hilaire Belloc:

It is worth noting, by the way, that the most
sentimental people, who are loudest against the right to wage a just
war, to execute a criminal, are just the people who are most likely to
be in favour of ‘putting incurables out of their pain,’ which the
commandment against murder most emphatically forbids. (Hilaire Belloc, Characters of the Reformation.)

There have been plenty of warnings in the past century about where the utilitarian ethos would lead us. Plenty of warnings.

Unlike the comment made by Alex Schadenberg, the executive direction of the Euthanasia Prevention Coalition in Canada, it is certainly not "ridiculous" that there should be such death panels that have the support of judges on Canadian courts in their decisions to end "useless" lives. This is not "ridiculous" at all. It is but the only logical end that can result from the overthrow of the Social Reign of Christ the King wrought by the Protestant Revolution and institutionalized by the combined, interrelated forces of Judeo-Masonry in the anti-Incarnational civil state of Modernity that has been accepted as legitimate by the conciliar revolutionaries under their slogan of "healthy" or "positive secularity." This is not ridiculous at all. Indeed, how can it said to be "ridiculous" for doctors to decide to kill little babies after birth because they are suffering from physical deformity when they kill living babies in their mothers' wombs for any reason whatsoever? The case of Baby Joseph Maraachli is, sadly and most tragically, simply the result of what happens when men and their nations do not live under the sweet yoke of the Social Reign of Christ the King as It must be exercised by His Catholic Church.

Yes, the power entrusted to the Ontario Consent and Capacity Board and to doctors and lawyers and judges in a "free" and "civilized" and "democratic" country such as Canada is the only thing that can result in nations that are steeped in the falsehoods of naturalism. Canada has always been about five or ten years ahead of the United States insofar as statism is concerned. Similarly, its conciliar "bishops," who have been, it appears, playing the role of the conciliar "bishop" of Saint Petersburg, Robert Lynch, in the case of the late Mrs. Schindler-Schiavo, that is, hidden mostly from public view (Lynch hid after making statements supportive of Michael Schiavo's "right" to kill of his wife), have always been about five or ten years ago of their fellow revolutionaries in the conciliar hierarchy right here in the United States of America. (I can find no statement made by the conciliar "bishop" of London, Ontario, Ronald Fabbro, on the diocesan website about Baby Joseph. There is a link to a news story in the Catholic Register of Canada about Baby Joseph to be found on the website of the Canadian Conference of "Catholic" Bishops, although I can find no statement from any conciliar "bishop" about the case. I have tried to do my due diligence here, finding nothing that gives even the hint of any kind of public statement made by a conciliar "bishop" in Canada about the case of Baby Joseph.)

Look at the powers possessed by the Ontario Consent and Capacity Board:

An independent provincial tribunal, the Consent and Capacity Board's
(CCB) mission is the fair and accessible adjudication of consent and
capacity issues, balancing the rights of vulnerable individuals with
public safety. The CCB's key areas of activity are the adjudication of
matters of capacity, consent, civil committal and substitute decision
making. Over 80 percent of applications to the CCB involve a review of a
person's involuntary status in a psychiatric facility under the Mental
Health Act, or a review under the Health Care Consent Act of a person's
capacity to consent to or refuse treatment.

The Board has the authority to hold hearings to deal with the following matters:

Health Care Consent Act

Review of capacity to consent to treatment, admission to a care facility or personal assistance service.

Consideration of the appointment of a representative to make
decisions for an incapable person with respect to treatment, admission
to a care facility or a personal assistance service.

Consideration of a request to amend or terminate the appointment of a representative.

Review of a decision to admit an incapable person to a hospital,
psychiatric facility, nursing home or home for the aged for the purpose
of treatment.

Consideration of a request from a substitute decision maker for directions regarding wishes.

Consideration of a request from a substitute decision maker for authority to depart from prior capable wishes.

Review of a substitute decision maker’s compliance with the rules for substitute decision making.

Mental Health Act

Review of involuntary status (civil committal).

Review of a Community Treatment Order.

Review as to whether a young person (aged 12 to 15) requires observation, care and treatment in a psychiatric facility.

Review of a finding of incapacity to manage property.

Personal Health Information Protection Act

Review of a finding of incapacity to consent to the collection, use or disclosure of personal health information.

Consideration of the appointment of a representative for a person
incapable of consenting to the collection, use or disclosure of
personal health information.

Review of a substitute decision maker’s compliance with the rules for substitute decision making.

Substitute Decisions Act

This is our own future under ObamaCare if the so-called "Affordable Health Care Act" of 2010 is not declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court of the United States of America. To draw upon a favorite phrase of this nation's thirty-seventh president, Richard Milhous Nixon, "make no mistake about it." ObamaCare is bound to lead to a clone of the Ontario Consent and Capacity Board, which is nothing other than a death panel. Make no mistake about it.

No, it does not matter that Baby Joseph Maraachli most likely will die within months. What matters is that his death is natural, that it not be caused by the decision of a government death panel, ratified by a judge, to remove his breathing tube from him over the rightful objections of his parents.

The removal of a ventilator or a breathing tube can be justified in some instances under the principle of the double-fold effect, which teaches us that it is permissible to undertake a morally licit action even if there is a foreseen but unintended evil consequence that is not directly willed as the first intention of that action. The removal of a ventilator or breathing tube permits the human body to do what it will or will not do on its own powers. The death of a person in such an instance is a foreseen but unintended evil consequence, something that is far, far different than removing food and water from a living human being. Breathing is an involuntary function of the human being. There are many cases where patients who have had their ventilators removed have continued to breathe on their own power (the case of Karen Ann Quinlan in New Jersey is the most famous as she lived over nine years after her ventilator was removed).

Eating and drinking are, however, voluntary functions of the human body with which we need assistance when we are infants and, quite perhaps, after suffering some catastrophic illness (a stroke, a heart attack, a traumatic injury). There is only one thing that can result from the removal of food and water: death, which can never be the first, direct, intentional end of any moral action. The provision of food and water, no matter how delivered, is ordinary care to a living human being, not extraordinary "medical treatment" that may be withdrawn under the principle of the double-fold effect.

The decision over the treatment of Baby Joseph Maraachli belongs solely to his parents and not to the Ontario Consent and Capacity Board, which is acting as it is because socialized medicine leads to rationing of health-care as patients on purely utilitarian, fiscal grounds that make a mockery of the Sovereignty of God over the lives of innocent human beings. And it is important to note that there is no moral imperative for Baby Joseph's parents to remove his ventilator. God is more powerful than machines. He will take Baby Joseph unto Himself when it is His time to do so, and His time is not determined by the members Ontario Consent and Capacity Board or by any judge or panel of judges.

Indeed, Dr. Paul Byrne, who has championed the case against the lie that it is "brain death" (Dr. Paul Byrne on Brain Death), is arguing that the standard medical procedure in the case of Baby Joseph Maraachli is to perform the tracheotomy that is desired by the parents to let him die at home from the disease that will, barring a miracle, take his young life, that it is immoral to removal the breathing tube in this case because the tracheotomy will preserve Baby Joseph Maraachli's life it until it the disease takes its course:

“They need to do a tracheostomy,” said Dr. Paul Byrne, an Ohio
neonatologist with nearly five decades of experience and a former
president of the Catholic Medical Association. “If the baby is stable
otherwise, and has a tracheostomy, then the baby can be taken care of at
home.”

In a “public information campaign” launched Sunday night, London
Health Sciences Centre, where Joseph has been treated since October,
defended their refusal to perform the tracheostomy. They called the
procedure, which involves inserting a breathing tube through a tiny slit
in the throat, “invasive,” and said it is “not a palliative procedure.”

“It is frequently indicated for patients who require a long term
breathing machine,” they wrote. “This is not indicated for Baby Joseph
because he has a progressive neurodegenerative disease that is fatal.”

This wording was repeated in today’s statement in which the hospital said Joseph could go home to die.

But Dr. Byrne told LifeSiteNews that “there’s no case” when a child
is on a ventilator where the tracheostomy wouldn’t be indicated.

The hospital is now asking Ontario’s Office of the Public Guardian to
intervene and allow them to take Joseph off his ventilator, after the
parents have continued to refuse consent. That office has been
unsuccessful in asking other family members to consent instead, and
could intervene itself any day.

Dr. Byrne called the attempt to have the state remove Joseph’s
ventilator “terrible, absolutely terrible,” and insisted that in his
fifty years in neonatology he’s never removed a child’s ventilator.
“I’ve never seen a time to turn off a ventilator,” he said. “If a baby
has a disease process that’s so bad that they’re going to die, then they
die on the ventilator anyway. So you don’t have to stop the
ventilator.”

He also criticized the common phrase “life support,” saying, “Life is
either there or it’s not there. You don’t have to hold up the life.
What we do in medicine are actions ... that support the vital activity
of respiration.”

“Assuming doctors can do something to support the vital activities,
we ought to do them,” he explained. “And a tracheostomy ought to be
done, and the baby ought to continue on the ventilator.”

Though doctors have said Joseph is in a “vegetative state,” Dr. Byrne
called it a “made-up term” similar to the notion of “brain death,”
which he said was invented “simply to get beating hearts for
transplantation.”

Even Joseph’s doctor in London has admitted that the tracheostomy
could prolong his life. “A tracheotomy would likely provide for a
longer period of life, however, in our view would not result in
improvement of well-being and could reduce quality of life,” Dr. Douglas
Fraser told the Ontario Consent and Capacity Board in January. (Baby Joseph can go home to die, but without tracheotomy: family says unacceptable.)

I yield entirely to Dr. Paul Byrne's expertise concerning the necessity of tracheotomy in this case and that the removal of Baby Joseph Maraachli's breathing tube is neither necessary or moral as the tracheotomy can sustain his life to the point of natural death. In such an instance, of course, the imperative is to sustain life until the point of natural death by the use of a simple surgical procedure. Note, please, the Orwellian statement made by Dr. Douglas Fraser concerning the "quality of life," indicating that he believes that death panels can decide to deny treatment based on their subjective analyses of what they consider to be a "good" "quality of life." Dr. Paul Byrne is speaking as a Catholic. Dr. Douglas Fraser is acting as an utilitarian.

And, please, my few readers, make no mistake about the fact that there is no naturalistic, "ecumenical," secularistic, legal, constitutional or electoral way out of this mess. The forces of evil that are at work in the world, forces that receive great impetus from the fact that there is a paucity of Sanctifying and Actual Graces in the world as a result of the Protestant and Masonic Novus Ordo service that is staged every day by the "bishops" and priests/presbyters of the counterfeit church of conciliarism, thereby offending the true God of Divine Revelation greatly by mocking Catholic worship as they do, will be stopped only by the Triumph of the Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart of Mary as the result of the perfect fulfillment of her Fatima Message by a true pope with all of the world's true bishops.

Have I mentioned lately that Catholicism is the one and only means of personal and social order?

Here we have, founded by Catholics, an
inter-denominational association that is to work for the reform of
civilization, an undertaking which is above all religious in character; for there is no true civilization without a moral civilization, and no
true moral civilization without the true religion: it is a proven truth,
a historical fact. (Pope Saint Pius X, Notre Charge Apostolique, August 15, 1910.)

May we pray to Our Lady as we prepare for the onset of Lent but nine days from now! We pray to Our Lady to help us to have the humility to make reparation for the many times that we have played the role of Judas Iscariot in our lives by selling out her Divine Son and His Holy Church in order to curry favor with the world and its false blandishments. How many times have we dealt death blows to our own souls and to the Church Militant on earth by refusing to be a faithful witness to the truths of the Catholic Faith with our relatives and friends and co-workers and acquaintances? How many times have we failed to see the suffering Christ in those who are enduring the cross of long term disabilities, thinking of them in utilitarian ways that would warm the coldest of Nazi or Soviet hearts?

May our Rosaries of reparation this day prepare us a good, well-lived, fully mortified Lent to Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ for giving us this forthcoming season of grace prior to entering deep into His Paschal Mysteries during Passiontide. May we never participate in the crucifixion of those, such as Baby Joseph Maraachli, who is in need of our fervent prayers at this time, who are considered "useless" by the world as these brothers and sisters of ours in the the King of Love on Calvary, people who we must treat as we would Our Lord Himself.

For some months we have been heating reports that inmates of establishments for the care of the mentally ill who have been ill for a long period and perhaps appear incurable have been forcibly removed from these establishments on orders from Berlin. Regularly the relatives receive soon afterwards an intimation that the patient is dead, that the patient's body has been cremated and that they can collect the ashes. There is a general suspicion, verging on certainty. that these numerous unexpected deaths of the mentally ill do not occur naturally but are intentionally brought about in accordance with the doctrine that it is legitimate to destroy a so-called “worthless life”” in other words to kill innocent men and women, if it is thought that their lives are of no further value to the people and the state. A terrible doctrine which seeks to justify the murder of innocent people, which legitimises the violent killing of disabled persons who are no longer capable of work, of cripples, the incurably ill and the aged and infirm!”

I am reliably informed that in hospitals and homes in the province of Westphalia lists are being prepared of inmates who are classified as “unproductive members of the national community” and are to be removed from these establishments and shortly thereafter killed. The first party of patients left the mental hospital at Marienthal, near Munster, in the course of this week.

German men and women! Article 211 of the German Penal Code is still in force, in these terms: “Whoever kills a man of deliberate intent is guilty of murder and punishable with death”. No doubt in order to protect those who kill with intent these poor men and women, members of our families, from this punishment laid down by law, the patients who have been selected for killing are removed from their home area to some distant place. Some illness or other is then given as the cause of death. Since the body is immediately cremated, the relatives and the criminal police are unable to establish whether the patient had in fact been ill or what the cause of death actually was. I have been assured, however, that in the Ministry of the Interior and the office of the Chief Medical Officer, Dr Conti, no secret is made of the fact that indeed a large number of mentally ill persons in Germany have already been killed with intent and that this will continue.

Article 139 of the Penal Code provides that “anyone who has knowledge of an intention to commit a crime against the life of any person . . . and fails to inform the authorities or the person whose life is threatened in due time . . . commits a punishable offence”. When I learned of the intention to remove patients from Marienthal I reported the matter on 28th July to the State Prosecutor of Munster Provincial Court and to the Munster chief of police by registered letter, in the following terms:

“According to information I have received it is planned in the course of this week (the date has been mentioned as 31st July) to move a large number of inmates of the provincial hospital at Marienthal, classified as ‘unproductive members of the national community’, to the mental hospital at Eichberg, where, as is generally believed to have happened in the case of patients removed from other establishments, they are to be killed with intent. Since such action is not only contrary to the divine and the natural moral law but under article 211 of the German Penal Code ranks as murder and attracts the death penalty, I hereby report the matter in accordance with my obligation under article 139 of the Penal Code and request that steps should at once be taken to protect the patients concerned by proceedings against the authorities planning their removal and murder, and that I may be informed of the action taken".

I have received no information of any action by the State Prosecutor or the police.

I had already written on 26th July to the Westphalian provincial authorities, who are responsible for the running of the mental hospital and for the patients entrusted to them for care and for cure, protesting in the strongest terms. It had no effect. The first transport of the innocent victims under sentence of death has left Marienthal. And I am now told that 800 patients have already been removed from the hospital at Warstein.

We must expect, therefore, that the poor defenceless patients are, sooner or later, going to be killed. Why? Not because they have committed any offence justifying their death, not because, for example, they have attacked a nurse or attendant, who would be entitled in legitimate self­defence to meet violence with violence. In such a case the use of violence leading to death is permitted and may be called for, as it is in the case of killing an armed enemy.

No: these unfortunate patients are to die, not for some such reason as this but because in the judgment of some official body, on the decision of some committee, they have become “unworthy to live,” because they are classed as “unproductive members of the national community”.

The judgment is that they can no longer produce any goods: they are like an old piece of machinery which no longer works, like an old horse which has become incurably lame, like a cow which no longer gives any milk. What happens to an old piece of machinery? It is thrown on the scrap heap. What happens to a lame horse, an unproductive cow?

I will not pursue the comparison to the end so fearful is its appropriateness and its illuminating power.

But we are not here concerned with pieces of machinery; we are not dealing with horses and cows, whose sole function is to serve mankind, to produce goods for mankind. They may be broken up; they may be slaughtered when they no longer perform this function

No: We are concerned with men and women, our fellow creatures, our brothers and sisters! Poor human beings, ill human beings, they are unproductive, if you will. But does that mean that they have lost the right to live? Have you, have I, the right to live only so long as we are productive, so long as we are recognised by others as productive?

If the principle that men is entitled to kill his unproductive fellow-man is established and applied, then woe betide all of us when we become aged and infirm!

If it is legitimate to kill unproductive members of the community, woe betide the disabled who have sacrificed their health or their limbs in the productive process! If unproductive men and women can be disposed of by violent means, woe betide our brave soldiers who return home with major disabilities as cripples, as invalids! If it is once admitted that men have the right to kill “unproductive” fellow-men even though it is at present applied only to poor and defenceless mentally ill patients” then the way is open for the murder of all unproductive men and women: the incurably ill, the handicapped who are unable to work, those disabled in industry or war. The way is open, indeed, for the murder of all of us when we become old and infirm and therefore unproductive. Then it will require only a secret order to be issued that the procedure which has been tried and tested with the mentally ill should be extended to other “unproductive” persons, that it should also be applied to those suffering from incurable tuberculosis, the aged and infirm, persons disabled in industry, soldiers with disabling injuries!

Then no man will be safe: some committee or other will be able to put him on the list of “unproductive” persons, who in their judgment have become “unworthy to live”. And there will be no police to protect him, no court to avenge his murder and bring his murderers to justice.

Who could then have any confidence in a doctor? He might report a patient as unproductive and then be given instructions to kill him! It does not bear thinking of, the moral depravity, the universal mistrust which will spread even in the bosom of the family, if this terrible doctrine is tolerated, accepted and put into practice. Woe betide mankind, woe betide our German people, if the divine commandment, “Thou shalt not kill”, which the Lord proclaimed on Sinai amid thunder and lightning, which God our Creator wrote into man's conscience from the beginning, if this commandment is not merely violated but the violation is tolerated and remains unpunished!